oh my god, lmao. I stumbled onto this blog by accident, and just. 😂 Pterodactyl's??? Why??? Your love for them is amazing???
Friend, I am so glad you asked.
My love for the pterodactyls, the prehistoric pterosaur wing-finger flap-flap friends, is true and real and strong, but this is not why I post so many of them. Let me tell you a story. It is the story of the semiotics of the pterodactyl tag.
A couple years back, I was looking for inspiration for writing a story ) that included a pterodactyl character. (TAH fans, you know what I’m talking about.) I typed “pterodactyl” into the handy dandy Tumblr search bar, and was greeted with something extraordinary.
The pterodactyl tag is absurd. Further, it’s deeply absurd, and the unplumbed depths of the absurdity within is... breathtaking. Of the posts tagged with “pterodactyl,” it seems to be equal parts artists trying out silly ideas, mid-century sci-fi book covers, actual information about pterosaurs, comic book art, inscrutable aesthetic posts, text posts about pterodactyl screams, and museum displays of varying quality. It’s WONDERFUL.
Here’s the thing. Nobody else seems to have noticed it.
This was my first discovery from my first foray into the pterodactyl tag. The image is an idyllic image of pterodactyls in a bog, and the superimposed text “Something is happening in Maine.”
This is absurd. It defies explanation. I thought it was great, and reblogged it with the half-joking correction “Wisconsin,” because that was a tangential plot point in the story that I was meant to be researching. To this day I claim the only note on that image.
This was the second discovery from the pterodactyl tag: it’s an image of a house, perhaps overlooking a beach, with the following text superimposed in light teal: “Although my memory’s fading, I remember two things very clearly: I am a pterodactyl, and you can bring them out whenever you want.” And then it was signed.
What??! Because I am an adult who can do this sort of thing when she feels like it, I looked into it further. What could it possibly mean? Here are the tags I put on the post:
i... i can't this is all over the place this guy runs a blog that's nothing but just girly things style quotes over photos but they're his own quotes? and the photos are completely unrelated to the content of the quotes? is this an art project? is this the best use of the medium i've ever seen? the pterodactyl tag is great what are “them”? what is he talking about? he runs a twitter that is exactly the same WHAT IS HAPPENING pterodactyl tag
There are three notes on that one.
The next one, with five notes at press time, is a picture of a bazooka bubblegum... um, joke? Whatever it is, it’s labeled a “bubble chat,” and it seems that someone in the marketing department was just like, “Jokes are hard, and writers are expensive. Let’s make the gum consumers write their own! We’ll just write either punchline or set up and let them fill in the blanks!” and then, and this is the most important part, decided that the jokes they set up should just be “This weekend I relaxed in a hot tub filled with marshmallow fluff,” and “And that's how I ended up with a pterodactyl tattoo.”
What. The. Hell. There are no words in the English language that could possibly fill in the blanks in that conversation to make it make sense. Guy on the left, a.k.a. the avatar of the gum consumer, has been given an impossible task: complete this conversation and explain something utterly inexplicable. This experience cannot exist and has not ever existed. There are simply no waypoints on the path between a hot tub full of marshmallow fluff and a pterodactyl tattoo.
It’s like they took a bunch of moderately interesting and funny concepts (hot tub! marshmallow fluff! pterodactyl tattoo!) and mashed them up into a strange joke format that literally has never existed in any language at any point in human history.
My comment on that one? “I want the whole world to be the pterodactyl tag.” I want to be confronted with the wonderful and diverse absurdity of life, and also the history of life on this planet, every dadgum day, through the medium of wing-finger pterosaurs, no exceptions. I want my life to be full of dinosaurs and cowboys and lasers and ballerinas and Ray Charles body doubles and barbarians and every other bananas thing in the tag. (IMPORTANT NEWSFLASH: THE MOST RECENT POST ON THE PTERODACTYL TAG IS LITERALLY BANANAS, MY GOD, PTERODACTYL TAG, TRULY YOU ARE A WONDER AND A DELIGHT IN THE MOST TRYING OF TIMES.)
In short, the pterodactyl tag is a wonderful exemplar of a unique brand of semi-dadaist modern art present on tumblr dot com, and whenever the world is too sad or overwhelming, I have a very happy place to go.
It’s a place where pterodactyls fly free and nothing hurts.
